Nothing about mobile really, but I thought I’d tap into your collective wisdom and see if anyone answer this.

Occasionally, you get an email, followed by another shortly afterwards as someone has an oh-my-god-did-I-really-press-send moment. The follow-up one says that:

Yada Yada would like to recall the message, “All you need to know about avoiding mistakes in emails”.

All this seems to achieve is to make me look harder at the original to see what’s so embarrassing about it that the sender doesn’t want me to see it. It doesn’t magically remove it from my email Inbox or something genuinely useful. So really, what’s the point in this tool? Can anyone shed light?

One of the mantras trotted out by all and sundry is that the mobile represents a great marketing medium “because it’s so personal” or is even “the most personal medium ever”. It’s become such a frequent statement that no one really questions its validity. Indeed, it’s become true through repetition - a sort of affirmation principle where if you keep saying something, it eventually happens.

However, I thought it worth exploring as I’m not so sure it’s especially true, certainly in the cause and effect way it’s presented. The argument implies that marketing messages via the mobile are somehow more trustworthy or believable and thus more effective. Or that messages are more personalised in some way than other media.

I think the origin of the thinking came from the old days of SMS Push, which never really got much beyond the foothills of the mobile marketing mountain range. The idea was that because sms is so “personal” - they normally come from friends - recipients were very likely to open sms marketing messages. Unlike say, email or Direct Mail, where many messages get binned without being read.

There might have been some truth in that for a while. But users wised up to screening out unwanted commercial sms pretty quickly.

However, the mobile medium has evolved from those days and now the most common forms of mobile marketing are almost certainly SMS Pull and graphical and text banners on mobile web sites.

SMS Pull doesn’t rely on the medium being Personal at all. Portable is certainly important, so people can react and engage with marketing messages on impulse. You could argue that when they send the sms in response that it contains a unique identifier (ie the mobile number), which allows the marketer to respond. But that’s not an unusual feature - response information in the form of a snail mail address, email ID or landline call is a feature of any form of direct response marketing and the mobile isn’t more or less personal because of it. In fact, it doesn’t even normally cater for an especially personalised response, certainly in comparison to say, Post Code data, unless of course the mobile number is already known and profiled in some way.

So whether or not the mobile is Personal is largely irrelevant for this kind of activity.

Next up, let’s consider banner ads. Really, these are not very different to their online cousins, which have been around a lot longer and thus are more mature, plus have features like Cookies available to track behaviour. Despite this, you’d be hard pressed to argue that these forms of marketing were especially personal in any way.

Even banners related to search results aren’t really personal or even personalised to the individual. And these results are notoriously prone to misinterpreting what the searcher is looking for. Cory Doctorow’s latest short story gives an example of an individual suspected of making rockets on the basis that he’s been involved in launching a brand of coffee called “Jet Fuel” and there are many, many incidences of similar errors.

That doesn’t mean that the mobile doesn’t make an excellent medium for marketing messages. There are loads of case studies of successful campaigns, which deliver far higher ROI than any other medium. But these successes come from context (that it’s on a mobile), targeting, copy writing, creative execution and a few other criteria. No one can claim plausibly today that they personalise this sort of advertising, whether it be online on on-mobile.

The final area that’s worth briefly examining is sponsoring P2P sms. Some companies are trying to jump on the bandwagon of inserting an advertising message into an sms that I might send to my wife or friends. Presumably, I, the user, get recompensed in this model by getting cheaper sms.

Leaving aside the question of whether this is a good medium or not, I don’t see how it’s going to be any more effective because it’s embedded in a personal message on my personal device. Sure, the recipient will open it, but will they be more likely act on it because of that? I doubt it.

Now, obviously the mobile phone is personal - actually many people wouldn’t even lend their mobile to someone else (63% in this example) - but I would argue that it doesn’t mean that it makes a better medium because of it.

Finally, let’s look to the future - maybe 10 years out - will the cause (personal) be any more closely linked to the claimed effect (better medium) then?

We’ll certainly be looking at a very different marketing landscape. All digital marketing will be highly targeted, personalised (where possible) and employ sophisticated algorithms that take into account behaviour, preferences and profiling of the recipient. But will this result in the mobile being a better medium because it’s personal in some way? In other words, will people be more likely to respond to the same message on mobile, as opposed to their PC on the basis that the mobile is “theirs” and the PC is shared?

No, in a word.

Am I missing something? If you’re a proponent of the mobile being personal and thus a better marketing medium, please tell me what I’m missing.

… successful content providers don’t equal successful mobile operators.

Think Disney understands this yet? Or is it going to take yet another MVNO failure for them to get it?

The discussion about how Vodafone UK is using Novarra’s transcoding technology to break the mobile web rolls on, but kudos to Tom Hume for spotting this gem from somebody at Novarra in an email to a W3C list:

A well-designed content transformation server can do a better job of following the mobile best practices than a human author, especially when taking into account the capabilities of the many different mobile devices. The result will be a more consistent, uniform experience.

As Tom points out, that’s not really the case. A machine can more blindly and accurately follow a set of rules, for sure, but the W3C’s mobile web best practices aren’t hard and fast rules, but suggestions, or as Tom says, common sense. To say that machines can do a better job of humans of dealing with context, information design, emotion and all the other aspects of user experience is fallacious; it also reveals a great deal about Novarra’s mindset.

Mike Rowehl chimes in with some commentary on how the supposed “resolution” to this issue, in the form of some W3C guideline, looks to be rather pointless. I’ve read through the linked emails and they’re largely over my head. Perhaps I’m just ignorant to some aspect of what’s going on here, but it really seems like there’s a pretty simple solution, without the need for all these mailing lists and consensus-building and committees and bylaws and such: Vodafone and Novarra could give up on their whitelist defense and simply pass through the correct user agent and return mobile content as intended by site developers.

Check out this week’s best writing about mobile at Abhishek Tiwari’s blog, with entries ranging from those highlighting the continuing boom in sms revenues (now at $100 billion) to a round up of the very latest business models in mobile.

Go and check it out.

Apple’s been silent to this point on how it feels about people unlocking the iPhone (as I did) so they can use it with the operator of their choice, rather than the operators the company inked exclusive deals with. But no longer: Apple says unlocking programs could break users’ devices when iPhone software updates are installed, and that unlocking an iPhone voids its warranty.

While the idea that unlocking the device could potentially harm it isn’t surprising, reading between the lines, this certainly sounds like the company’s saying “we’re going to break your phone with our software update.” Furthermore, it sounds like more doublespeak out of the company, with an exec saying that “It’s unfortunate that some of these [unlocking] programs have caused damage to the iPhone software.” It’s hard to know exactly what “damage” this is — whether it actually does something detrimental to the device (which seems unlikely, given that I’ve not really had any problems since I unlocked mine), or whether the damage refers to the fact that users have skirted Apple’s exclusive deal with AT&T.

What’s really unfortunate here is Apple’s choice of business model, but that’s for another post — in which I’ll explain how the iPhone really is little more than Apple sticking its middle finger up at the mobile industry and its customers.

Back in June, I pointed how Vodafone UK’s newly launched “improvements” to the mobile web experience for its customers included using a transcoding system from Novarra that undoes the hard work of developers and publishers that have bothered to create mobile-specific sites that use autodetection. Instead of passing through the correct user agent from a handset, the transcoder appears as a PC web browser to sites. The site then gives up the full version of its pages, instead of the mobile-specific content its publishers have created.

Obviously Vodafone’s thinking here is to make the mobile browsing experience more rewarding for their users by making it easier for them to view whatever sites they want on their handset. That’s great — but this really isn’t a good way to go about it, since it discourages developers and publishers from creating mobile-specific version of their sites that use autodetection, so users can just visit the same URLs they’re used to visiting on their PCs. There’s some whitelist that site owners can apparently get themselves on so visitors to their sites won’t get transcoded content originally intended for viewing on PC, but that’s less ideal than simply passing along the proper content, regardless of whether the site owner’s made the effort to get whitelisted.

In any case, Vodafone’s not made any real changes or improvements to the system, and the fuss is kicking up again. Luca Passani, one of the guys behind WURFL, the open-source configuration file that helps web developers adapt their content to different mobile devices, isn’t happy at all about what Vodafone’s doing, nor with their explanation/justification for it. The story’s getting some press now, too, which will hopefully lead Vodafone to take some corrective action.

The company claims that it wants to make things better for users, but this sounds like the latest iteration of a walled-garden mentality by essentially choosing what content to present to users, and how it will be presented, rather than leaving those decisions to site owners and developers. Surely there’s a way the company can support its desire for transcoding while respecting those developers who have created mobile sites by passing through the user agent?

I’ve been pondering for a while the consequences of regime change and modern technology. In other words, what would happen if today’s technology tools were available to an extremist government?

If you re-read Orwell’s 1984, all the surveillance and monitoring techniques are already deployed and more - even he didn’t envisage a scenario where all our email correspondence, online behaviour and mobile calls could be monitored, where we all carry a tracking device on a voluntary basis and where (in the UK at least) there’s a video camera on almost every street corner. Let alone when every citizen routinely carries a video camera, with which to monitor and record their fellow citizens. All we need now is regime change and it’ll make the reach and power of an organisation like the KGB appear childlike. And this kind of coup can, and regularly has, happened in recent history.

Cory Doctorow’s excellent new short story “Scroogled” brings it to life.

Are we going to stand by and let it happen? Damn right we are.

Following yesterday’s dissection of the Reality Distortion Field, UK edition, it would appear that El Jobso is rubbing off on operators selling the iPhone. It was confirmed today that T-Mobile would offer the device in Germany, and the company’s press release did a most excellent job of trying to cover up the iPhone’s shortcomings in the “fast mobile data” category.

Like O2 in the UK, T-Mobile says it will spend a bunch of money deploying EDGE across its network, despite its huge investment in 3G and its current rollout of 7.2 Mbps HSDPA. Nevertheless, it’s forced to try and defend El Jobso’s skewed worldview about 3G, battery life and Wi-Fi, so it trots out this gem:

By the end of 2007, T-Mobile will be the only network operator in Germany to offer EDGE throughout its entire GSM network. EDGE accelerates the mobile data transfer rate to over 220 Kilobits per second, which makes it almost four times as fast as ISDN in fixed-line networks.

Four times as fast as ISDN? Seriously? The company’s launching a leading-edge HSDPA network, yet thanks to Apple’s technical indifference or incompetence, they’re forced to act like being faster than dialup is something wonderful. No word on whether T-Mobile’s CEO is now wearing black turtlenecks as well.

Chatting with Keiran from Reporo(who are going great guns, I’m pleased to report) last night at the Mobile Entertainment Awards (AdMob won again - yay!) I managed to articulate a thought that’s been nagging at me for some time, specifically about mobile applications. It might be obvious to some, but I haven’t actually heard it expressed, so I thought I’d share it.

One of the reasons for the rapid development and success of the PC web has been the ability to rapidly iterate, test, perfect and iterate again in a matter of hours. Some websites have completely changed their business model in this way and design, user experience and functionality have changed out of recognition from the early days, even taking into account the influence that faster speeds have enabled. I mean just look at eBay back in 1998 via the Way Back Machine and today.

One of the challenges of mobile is that the mobile web just doesn’t provide the same user experience as its cousin the PC web, forcing many companies to implement a Java application, or JME, as it’s not been rechristened by Sun, to give users the full intended functionality.

The problem with JME is that while it’s a great development platform, its a complete nightmare to port over the the many devices it needs to be used on. So a developer finds themselves having to do 80% of the work after the development is finished and before roll out can begin. For this reason, Sun is going to lose its domination in the mobile apps market, either to a new pretender or to the emerging power of the mobile web itself. Indeed many companies are abandoning JME altogether, accepting the compromises that go with a mobile web-only product. As far as Sun is concerned, this is like a marathon runner getting beaten to the finish line, despite having 26 mile, 384 yard head start. Some would argue that the issues are caused by networks and device manufacturers, but surely it’s Sun’s job to set and maintain standards so that JME could have been a feasible platform in the porting process.

However, the fact remains that many companies still do use JME as the platform of choice and it’s led to a stifling of innovation, as the whole iteration process is just so damn complex. Yes, you can make changes easily, but the deployment cycle makes rapid deployment almost impossible, leading to small and large changes being introduced as part of regular updates, like software.

There’s a strong argument to suggest that if the web evolved in a similar way, with regular 6 monthly (or so) refreshes as opposed to daily iterations, we’d never have seen the rapid changes ushered in with Web 2.0.

I conclude that if you must have a JME application to give the user the full experience (and consider long and hard if you can’t actually do it on the mobile web alone), you need at least a stripped down mobile web version. That way, users can flirt with the idea without committing the marriage involved in a download and it gives you an playpen to innovate, iterate and test new ideas.